Suchergebnisse

This article argues that empirical considerations of production processes have been largely neglected in discussions of the global/local flows associated with telecasting mass-mediated sport. An ethnographically oriented analysis of the labor processes involved in televising the 1995 Canada Cup of Soccer (CCS) was conducted in order to establish the contexts, pressures, and discourses that operate at the level of production. The article focuses on how conditions created by global capitalism altered the labor processes involved in the production of the event. As a result, the crew's interpretations of the CCS operated both within and through a consumer-oriented global logic.

This article addresses how physical risk and injury in recreational cycling can be understood as constitutive of the culture of sport. Using data from interviews with racing cyclists, accounts of cycling accidents posted on an Internet website, and items related to accidents and safety issues from cycling publications, the paper explores how the perception of risk and the occurrence of injury are constructed as everyday expected elements of the sport. Although the sport is objectively dangerous, cyclists construe risk as a salient feature of participation and routinely engage in conversational practices that normalize its occurrence, thus defusing it as a deterrent to continued participation. Cyclists were found to warrant risk as part of the terrain of riding, along with crashes, close calls, injuries and premonitions. These motifs constitute storied events, which often serve both to exhibit and to assert membership in the cycling subculture.

This article investigates national similarities and differences with respect to how women enter the world of football and whether gender relations continue to impact on both their access to and opportunities in the sport. The data comes from 40 semi-structured interviews with top-level women footballers in England, Germany, Norway and Spain. Early male influences are discussed in relation to: existing work on socialization into sport, notions of femininity, and the different cultural contexts. The organization of youth sport is identified as a crucial factor in influencing girls and young women's opportunities to play football. Furthermore, although men continue to have a considerable influence on the women's game, even when women have no conscious intentions of resistance, they incorporate their own meanings into the sport.

This article identifies different socio-economic approaches to sport: the influence of economy on social behaviour; the impact of social behaviour on the economy; and the interactions between economy and society. It argues that these perspectives are based on three major disciplinary orientations: the economic sociology of sport; the sociology of rational (sporting) choice; and the economy of bounded rationality. However, it is shown that these three disciplinary fields do not constitute a unifying paradigm.

This article examines the clientelistic relations which underpinned the activities of the Greek state in the field of sports policy between 1981 and 1993. It focuses on aspects of the patronage that existed between the governments of the two major political parties and some of the national governing bodies (NGBs) that control specific sports. More specifically, the study analyses the forms of political patronage employed in support of sports organizations, the processes through which such patronage is exercised, and the impacts of such support on the budgets of particular NGBs. The study employed structured interviews with key national sporting and political figures and documentary analysis of budgets of NGBs. The article demonstrates how particular parties have systematically favoured certain NGBs when they have been in office. The article concludes with a review of reasons for the continued existence of clientelistic relationships in the contemporary context.

This study analyzes the major factors related to the high turnover rate in French boxing. In 1995, the drop-out rate of French boxers was 54 percent, which consisted primarily of beginners and young participants in the 14-20 age bracket. Withdrawal from the sport results from four, inter-related factors: (1) the difference between participants' expectations and the reality of the sport; (2) the quality of the relationships between training partners; (3) the coaching quality; and (4) the organizational quality of the clubs.

This article compares the Golden Girls of Sport calendar, which was ostensibly launched to provide Australian women competing in the 1996 Olympic Games with greater access to the media, with a special issue of black+ white magazine, titled The Atlanta Dream, which featured Australian men and women competitors at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. The two publications are analysed in the context of gender theory, with particular focuses on the social construction of gendered bodies and the different ways that femininity and masculinity are represented in the mass media.